The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  For there is no mistaking the sexual and sadistic nature of these punishments imposed on women. The infamous Judge Jeffreys, a pillar of the state in seventeenth-century England, summed it up, when sentencing a prostitute to be whipped: ‘Hangman, I charge you to pay particular attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly, man – scourge her till the blood runs down. It is Christmas, a cold time for madam to strip. See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly.’37

  Sex, sin, suffering – the prominence of these themes in the story of prostitution is to be found in the lives of their married sisters too. For whores and wives were not, as patriarchal propaganda had it, ‘devils and angels’, opposing species, but two sides of the same coin. As women, both groups were subjected to the same punitively narrow definition of their sexuality and the same restrictions of the deployment of it. Despite a relentless ideological and physical battery, some women chose the preferred mode of winning respectability through submission, others most decisively did not. How did women find the strength and knowledge to resist their own downgrading, to discover their power to make their own definitions and by so doing transcend those of men?

  6

  A Little Learning

  By God, if women had written stories

  As clerks have written their oratories,

  They would have written of men more wickedness,

  Than all the race of Adam may redress.

  CHAUCER, The Wife of Bath’s Tale

  Women should not learn to read and write unless they are going to be nuns, as much harm has come from such knowledge.

  PHILIPPE OF NAVARRE

  Gather what little drops of learning you can, and consider them a great treasure.

  CHRISTINE DE PISAN

  For countless generations of women, the tyranny of the father gods and gynophobes had seemed absolute, unassailable. But as the first thousand years of Christianity drew to a close, the impetus for change emerged where it was least expected, within the steel heart of the systems themselves. They were too harsh, too inflexible; and over the years, the men and women of these societies slowly declined to Uve by them. The barrage of bans forbidding intercourse, for instance, was very much a patriarchal own goal – in the early Middle Ages, Christians were prohibited from sex on Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Ember days, during Lent and Advent, or before communion. Sex was also forbidden when a woman was menstruating, pregnant or lactating, a severe restriction considering the frequency of pregnancy, for of course contraception was also forbidden. On the occasional free Tuesday, a couple had to observe the regulations governing the approved positions: ‘missionary’ was in, ‘after the dog’s fashion’ definitely out. Even in the heyday of the Church’s anti-sex hysteria, it is hard to believe that there were no backsliders, of both sexes.

  For as long as women and men loved and desired one another, attacks on female sexuality could never have been totally successful. Not all women consented to be made victims of their own biology; many showed a baffling inability to learn the lesson of their secondary status. This spirited rebuke to the early Christian fathers came from within the Church itself, in the teaching of the sixteenth-century leader of the Counter-Reformation, St Teresa of Avila:

  When thou wert in the world, Lord, thou didst not despise women, but didst find more faith and no less love in them than in men . . . it is not right to repel minds which are virtuous and brave, even though they be the minds of women.1

  But as this shows, to mount a successful challenge to the denigration of women, and to assert the value of their minds, meant meeting male authority on its own ground. Women had to gain entry to the processes of definition and the making of meaning. They too had to be able to read, study and debate. Ignorant, they were inferior; learned, they were armed. So learning became the next battleground as it assumed the crucial centrality it holds to this day, when without it there is no hope for women of penetrating men’s space, mental space.

  Of course women had always had their own kind of space. This most commonly derived from territory carved out as female through the rites and traditions shared with other women. From the range of historical records of the early modern period, there is abundant evidence of the existence of secret societies of women practising rituals of a fertility or sexual nature in many parts of Eastern Europe, and particularly Africa. Often these spilled over into public demonstrations. In medieval Ukraine, for instance, village women at weddings united to overthrow all normal canons of modest wifely behaviour: in a ceremony of female flashing known as ‘burning the bride’s hair’ they would hold their skirts waist high and jump over a roaring fire. Men who intruded on these activities did so at their own risk. In Schleswig at the same period any man who met the women of his village in their ceremonial procession to celebrate the birth of a child would have his hat filled with horse-dung and rammed back on his head; while in the Trobriand Islands women had the right to attack a man who ventured onto their fields while they were working.2

  All these customs, and there are many more worldwide, express a common theme of aggression against men, often coupled with erotic or obscene activities. Yet they were condoned by individual husbands and sanctioned by the society at large. It is hard to find any culture, in fact, where women as a group did not enjoy some form of the space or freedom that was denied to them as individuals. Throughout their history, Australian Aboriginal males have been notoriously harsh to their womenfolk, sticking spears through their upper arms as a punishment, slicing off lumps of flesh from their buttocks, or cracking their skulls. Yet alongside the often savage oppression co-existed something not known elsewhere in the world, the jilimi, or ‘single women’s camp’:

  Here live widows who have chosen not to remarry, estranged wives of violent husbands, women who are ill or visiting from another country, and all their dependent children. In fact any woman who wants to live free of the conflicts of heterosexual society may seek refuge in the jilimi. Married women living with their husbands congregate in the jilimi in the day to talk and plan visits, family affairs and ritual matters. The jilimi is taboo to all men, who must often travel long circuitous routes to avoid passing nearby . . .3

  In other forms of resistance to men’s control, women were known to mount a flagrant challenge to their husbands, as in this custom of the San bush people of South Africa:

  Only women played flutes. They would leave the camp when the spirit moved them to challenge another group in a fluting competition . . . for three or four days they gave themselves over to fluting, dancing, sex with their male hosts, and feasting till all the food was consumed. Then they walked back fluting to their camp . . . no man dared follow them . . .4

  European and Asian women of the Middle Ages showed a lively interest in what they knew of their African counterparts, generally sympathizing with them for their ‘primitive’ and ‘barbaric’ condition. Yet in many ways African women like these were more fortunate than their sisters in the more ‘advanced’ part of the globe. Ibn Batuta, a prudish Islamic merchant visiting Mali in the fourteenth century, was horrified to see the bare breasts of the unmarried women as they met freely in the marketplace, and the unregulated sociability of the wives.5

  This was the golden age of Mali under the greatest of its emperors, Mansa Musa. But throughout Africa the ancient tribal patterns, closer to nature and to their own origins, respected women’s rights and lent them freedoms that in the rest of the world had vanished into mythology. Nowhere in Africa south of the Sahara were women veiled, nowhere physically restrained or secluded. The slow pace of change and the continuance of age-old traditions often favoured them – one major all-female ceremonial, the celebration of the ‘Feast of Salt’, which lasted until the colonial invasions, was first recorded by Herodotus in the fifth century.

  From their highly valued work as the managers of the all-important salt harvest, as well as their centrality in cultivating, marketing and trading, African women derived an enhanced status. Uduk males, for instance, had no truck with dowries or
bride-sales, saying they would not sell their sister for a goat or two as if she were a goat herself. Ashanti customs gave women primacy over men on the grounds that the highest debt was owed to the mother, since she had formed each human body from her own body and blood. For the African delight at the birth of a daughter, for the African woman’s freedom to come and go as she pleased, to meet her friends in the marketplace for the cheery gossip so frowned on by Ibn Batuta, and to play a leading role in the life of her family and group, the European or Asian woman denied all of these might well have questioned which of these societies was the more primitive.

  Aristocratic women, especially in Europe, had more freedom, and some used it to the full. In the reign of Henry III of England (1207–72), Isabella Countess of Arundel shouted down the king in an angry challenge to his authority over the bride-sale of one of the royal wards, and then swept out without waiting or even asking for the customary leave to depart. Another Isabella, of Angoulême, widow of King John, and hence Henry’s stepmother, wrote from France to her ‘dearest son’ the king that she had ‘improved upon’ his arrangements for the dynastic marriage of her ten-year-old daughter by marrying the man herself. King Henry was no match for forceful women, even those who according to the rules owed him unquestioning obedience. His sister Eleanor had been married at nine to the King’s Earl Marshal in an important dynastic union. Widowed at sixteen, she deliberately compromised herself with the man she loved in order to forestall another unwelcome marriage by forcing the king to agree to this one. Despite threats and fulminations against her ‘defiler’, the king had to repair the royal honour, and himself gave her away at the wedding ceremony in 1238.

  Not all women, though, had the clout bestowed by high social class. And with the emergence from the Dark Ages, the concept of power itself was changing from the older power games of bash and grab. Now knowledge became the high road to control, and for women the pen had one major advantage over the sword; it fitted neatly into a female fist of any size, age, creed or country in the world. Following the imposition of monotheism, the principal escape for women into the wider world of learning lay paradoxically behind the locked doors of an enclosed community. Most familiar to us now are the well-documented nunneries of Western Europe, but it is noteworthy that Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam all had their own religious sisterhoods in early modern times. One famous female Sufi mystic and religious teacher was Rabi-’ah al-’ Ada-wiyyah (712–801), who after a girlhood in slavery fled to the desert, where she rejected all offers of marriage and devoted herself to prayer and scholarship. Although the most distinguished of women Sufis, Rabi’ah was not unique, since Sufism gave all women the chance to attain a holy dignity equal to that of a man.6

  Rabi’ah’s achievement built on a tradition of female literacy, scholarship and intellectual creativity reaching back to the dawn of thought. Countless ancient myths ascribe the birth of language to women or goddesses, in a ritual formulation of the primeval truth that the first words any human being hears are the mother’s. In Indian mythology the Vedic goddess Vac means ‘language’; she personifies the birth of speech, and is represented as a maternal mouth-cavity open to give birth to the living word. The Hindu prayer to Devaki, mother of Krishna, begins, ‘Goddess of the Logos, Mother of the Gods, One with Creation, thou art Intelligence, the Mother of Science, the Mother of Courage . . .’ In other myths women invent not merely language, but the forms to write it down, as Elise Boulding explains: ‘Carmenta created a Latin language from the Greek, Medusa gave the alphabet to Hercules, Queen Isis to the Egyptians [while] the priestess-goddess Kali invented the Sanskrit alphabet.’7

  In many cultures, the early learned women and their work were much admired; Egypt had a caste of scribe-priestesses under Seshat, goddess of the alphabet and ‘mistress of the house of books’, while the Indian Veda contains a prayer for a scholarly daughter. Ancient Vedic texts, indeed, contain many admiring references to female scholars, poets and seers, and these learned women were permitted to display their knowledge and skills of disquisition in public on occasions.8 Later, in Greece, the genius of certain women scholars and philosophers was freely acknowledged by their contemporaries, though not at all by history; Pythagoras, for instance, whom every schoolboy knows, was taught by one woman (Aristoclea), married to another, Theano, a leading mathematician and teacher of philosophy when he met her, and influenced by a third, his daughter Dano, who also concerned herself with the question of women’s education. A further woman in this circle, Diotima, also taught Socrates, whose principal teacher and that of Plato was the peerless Aspatia of Miletos, dubbed ‘the first lady of Athens’. Like Dano she championed the education of women, and fearlessly used her position as a non-Greek to flout legislation restricting women to their houses, visiting other women in their homes and educating them herself.

  As this shows, the severest restriction could not ultimately prevent private study, and may well have even encouraged it. A classic example of the way patriarchal rules could sometimes work to the advantage of women, not against them, is provided by the fine tradition of Japanese women’s writing. At the Emperor’s court only men were permitted to use the scholarly language of Chinese: women were restricted to their own Japanese vernacular, on pain of mockery, disgrace or punishment. The ‘beautiful irony’ of this has not escaped later commentators: ‘Dozens of women wrote brilliant literature that is still read today, while the men, whose “superior” Chinese produced a stilted and unnatural literature, are read only for historical information.’9 For it was in her own tongue that Lady Murasaki wrote the world’s first novel and still one of its greatest, The Tale of Genji, at the beginning of the eleventh century, a golden age of female creativity in Japan, when education for women was a requirement, not a stigma.

  Yet as the story of Lady Murasaki shows (she only became a writer after her husband died and her father placed her at court with orders to amuse the emperor), there were deep contradictions within the demands made on women in the interests of men, that could be turned to women’s advantage. With the gruesome parodies of both the marriage and funerary rituals (the novices were initiated wearing wedding finery, as ‘brides of Christ’ and were given the last rites, as dying to the world) the convents of Europe have been seen as naked manifestations of patriarchal tyranny. But for some women, they provided the only sanctioned avenue of escape from the tyranny of enforced marriage and its inescapable infliction of motherhood. As to dying, the virgin recluse living a life of quiet contemplation and scholarship had every chance of living for two, three or even four times longer than her married sister; convent records show that nuns very often survived to the age of eighty, ninety, even 100, while the reality of contemporary childbirth is clearly indicated in the words of Psalm 116, directed for the use of women in labour: ‘The snares of death compassed me round: and the pains of hell gat hold on me . . . O Lord I beseech thee, deliver my soul . . .’

  Within a convent, however, a woman could preserve both her soul and her body, and it is a striking illustration of women’s power to convert a disability into a source of strength that so many of them used their conventual retreat as a platform from which they could, in Mary Ritter Beard’s words, ‘spring into freedom’. The origin and base of the convent life may have been the harsh patriarchal disgust with women’s bodies which dictated that they had best be covered, denied, shut away, and as such it is close to kindred restrictive practices in Islam like veiling and seclusion. But as a logical consequence, the women who rose above their filthy bodies with the transcendent act of ‘virgin sacrifice’ won high esteem from contemporary males who naturally assumed that forswearing heterosexual activity was the greatest sacrifice in the world. By firmly demonstrating that sex was not on their agenda, religious women sloughed off the odium attaching to sexually active women, and gained an almost mystical power from their inviolate status – a card that was still being played with confidence and success by Elizabeth I centuries later.

  In refusing marriage
, nuns were also rejecting its associated roles of mother and housekeeper. This ‘sacrifice’ has to be assessed in the light of one thirteenth-century vignette of the wife who ‘hears when she comes in her baby screaming, sees the cat at the flitch and the hound at the hide, her cake burning on the stone hearth and her calf suckling all the milk, the crock running into the fire and the churl [man of the house] chiding’.10 Freed from such cares, women were free to concentrate upon themselves, if only after a lifetime of the traditional work of concentrating on others (many married women retired to convents after rearing their families, in the early modern equivalent of mutual-consent divorce). Having taken the only permitted way out of marriage to be found this side of the grave, the sisters were thereby positioned in a sanctioned independence and poised to achieve not simply in the solitude of the study but in the world at large.

  For running counter to the notion of the enclosed life of the religious was the importance of each ‘house of women’ in its community. This conferred on the women who ran it a licence to move in the public arena, to take charge, to initiate change. From the Brigid of the fifth century who founded the first women’s community in Ireland, to her Swedish namesake who established a new order, ‘the Brigetines’ in 1370, there is an unbroken line of women of extraordinary drive and organizational ability, who used to the full the privilege of their position of being outside the control of any man. Some shrewd tacticians indeed sought the power base that religion could provide, like Radegund, queen of the Franks, who, having founded the abbey of the Holy Cross at Poitiers in the sixth century, then bullied the archbishop to make her a deacon of the church on the strength of it.